I would like to thank the many people who have helped me on the path
towards this dissertation, both during and before my time at Stanford.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have had Pat Hanrahan as an
advisor for the past five years. Pat has been an inspiration to me
since I first met him at The Geometry Center in 1991. When I was
considering graduate schools a few years later, a major part of my
decision-making procedure was to read through the previous decade of
Siggraph proceedings. I ended up at Stanford because I found that the
papers that most delighted me had Pat's name on them. What I value
most about this past five years was the opportunity to absorb not only
his insights into the specifics of my work, but his fundamental
approach to research that emphasizes rigor and first principles.

I next thank the members of my reading committee for their time and
energy in helping me improve this document: Marc Levoy, Terry
Winograd, and Stephen North. I have had the pleasure of learning from
them in other ways as well. Listening to a quarter of Marc's lectures
on rendering as his teaching assistant provided a valuable lesson on
how to simultaneously engage and challenge an audience. I was able to
observe Terry's approach to project management through my involvement
in the Interactive Mural project. Stephen's thorough
knowledge of the field of graph drawing has been a valuable resource,
and I appreciate his trip from the East Coast to attend my oral
defense.

Several fellow graduate students share an interest in information
visualization. My deepest gratitude is due to François
Guimbretière for being a coauthor, a friend, and an intellectual
sparring partner. His insightful commentary on drafts of this entire
dissertation and many previous papers has been immensely useful in
helping me clearly communicate my sometimes inchoate thoughts. Our
innumerable hours spent discussing the issues of information
visualization and related topics have been a major influence in my
vision of the entire field. Maneesh Agrawala, Robert Bosch, Chris
Stolte, and Diane Tang have been both intellectual and personal
comrades, and have also spent many hours reading paper drafts.

I have enjoyed the company of my several officemates: thanks to Lucas
Pereira for his stupendous enthusiasm and nearly irrepressible ability
to take joy in life, Sean Anderson for many hours of illuminating
conversations and the occasional piano serenade, Karen Butler for her
level-headed companionship, and Larry Page for an uncounted number
of jovial arguments.

I also thank many of the other people in the 3B wing who have
contributed to its convivial atmosphere, including Andrew Beers, Cindy
Chen, Greg Humphreys, Craig Kolb, David Koller, and Gordon Stoll.
John Owens has gathered vast amounts of good karma by proofreading
this entire document. Thanks to John Gerth for keeping the graphics
lab machines running
despite any and all fits of tempermentality on their part, and also
for sharing his accumulated wisdom in the fields of visualization and
graphics. Ada Glucksman's continual good cheer was contagious as she
shielded me as much as possible from the bureaucratic maw of the
university, as did Sarah Beizer. Thanks to James Davis for being my
partner in adversity through the past four years of designing,
building and supporting the video lab. Thanks also to Phil Lacroute,
who helped me reverse-engineer and transport the previous video rack
to the then-new Gates Building.

Thanks to many current and former people in the Stanford Computer
Science department for their friendship over the years, including
Guido Appenzeller, Edouard Bugnion, Stuart Cheshire, Tom Costello,
Pavani Diwanji, Denis Leroy, Dave Ofelt, Anna Patterson, and Beth
Seamans. Lise Getoor has in particular been my comrade in arms for the
past five years.

I gratefully acknowledge the efforts of the rest of the Site Manager
product team at Silicon Graphics: Ken Kershner, Greg Ferguson, Alan
Braverman, Donna Scheele, Doug O'Morain, and Julie Brodeur. I also
thank the following people and organizations for the use of the data
used in Chapter 3: function call graph data from Anwar
Ghuloum of the Stanford University Intermediate Format (SUIF)
compilers group, Autonomous Systems data from Hans-Werner Braun of the
National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) and David M.
Meyer of the University of Oregon Route Views Project, and Internet
routing and Autonomous System data from Daniel W. McRobb of the
Consortium for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)

I am grateful for the time and ideas of the computational linguists
from Microsoft Research who were the target users of the Constellation
systems: Lucy Vanderwende, Bill Dolan, and Mo Corston-Oliver. Thanks
also to Mike Barnett for providing MindNet support, Mary
Czerwinski for her significant contributions to the user-centered
design and evaluation process, and George Robertson of the User
Interface group at Microsoft Research for hosting me as an intern
during the summer of 1998.

This work was mainly supported by the National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Microsoft Research
Graduate Fellowship Program. Additional support was also provided by
the Advanced Research Projects Agency (grant 2DMA818) and Silicon
Graphics. I am also grateful for the support of the SFB288
Differential Geometry and Quantum Physics group at the Technical
University of Berlin, where I spent a refreshing and productive summer
as a visiting researcher before starting the graduate program at
Stanford.

I have had the great fortune of benefiting from the wisdom,
encouragement, and friendship of many mentors. The somewhat roundabout
causal chain that led me to this dissertation started with two
junior high school teachers. In eighth grade my science teacher Dennis
Searle encouraged me to apply for a formal industry mentorship
program, which led me to spend the summer learning FORTRAN at
Control Data's supercomputer division. I am extremely grateful that my
mentor Dick Kachelmeyer gave his time unstintingly, both in person
that summer and in many phone conversations over the years. He has
been advising me to get a PhD since I was twelve years old, and my
decision to both start grad school and stay here until finished is in
no small part due to his unswerving advocacy. Dick was also
instrumental in helping me find my first job in the computer industry:
I spent three summers at Control Data's supercomputer spinoff company
ETA Systems.

The other life thread started in sixth grade, when my math teacher
Sally King allowed and encouraged me to start working independently. I
ended up in the accelerated classes of the University of Minnesota
Talented Youth Mathematics Project. This project not only gave me the
opportunity to finish all the mathematics requirements for an
engineering degree by the end of high school, but also led to my next
summer job thanks to a follow-on program to help alumni find
interesting internships. These two threads of my life intertwined when
my resume was sent to the Geometry Supercomputer Project, in what
appears to be a clear case of word-based pattern matching.

It was during my summer at the GSP that I fell in love with computer
graphics, and I returned there as a technical staff member after I
received my undergraduate degree from Stanford, by which time the GSP
had become the NSF-funded Geometry Center. Charlie Gunn and Stuart
Levy were both friends and mentors during my four years there, which
were instrumental in shaping my career goals. I thank Charlie for
sharing his experience through a broad range of lessons about
graphics, mathematics, life in industry, and life in general. I am
grateful that I was able to absorb a small part of Stuart's immense
technical knowledge, and also to be exposed to his philosophy of life:
he is the gentlest person that I have ever met, and one of the
kindest. While at the Center, I also learned from Al Marden, Dick
McGehee, Mark Phillips, and George Francis. I am also grateful for the
continuing friendship of former colleagues Celeste Fowler and Nina
Amenta.

Thanks to k claffy for being both a friend for the past dozen years
and the impetus of the Planet Multicast project, introducing me to my
coauthors Bill Fenner and Eric Hoffman. I am deeply appreciative of
Eric's companionship, both intellectual and personal, over the past four
years.

I acknowledge, appreciate, and return the love and support of my
family, without whom I would be lost. My parents Joan and Aribert
Munzner have been my emotional anchors through not only the vagaries
of graduate school, but my entire life. My sister's partner Sheila
Oehrlein has also become an important person in my world. My sister
Naomi will always share a part of my soul, and I dedicate this thesis
to her.